Believe it or not, not too long ago our government actually thought we would have the national debt paid off.  When Clinton was preparing to leave office some of his officials and economists were looking at the possibility of having the national debt paid off by 2012.  And they were worried about it. NPR’s Planet [...]

Or at least less unprotected humping.  In news that won’t surprise anyone, people have less babies during recessions.  The Pew Research Center apparently thought it was worth the  money to confirm what many people already know.  Pew looked at birth rates for 25 states in the union and found that very obvious thoughts are true.  [...]

Fans of football or video games may be familiar with the the John Madden Curse, but for others I might need to explain. There is a very popular video game that provides realistic football game play called “Madden”. Since the late 90s the game has featured a well known football player on the cover each [...]

The telecommunications industry has always been a fickle one. They had monopolies, they were broken up, they gradually monopolized again, and face very little competition. They were originally granted monopoly power in order to make it worth their investment in all the telephone poles they had to put up. Nowadays the industry makes more money [...]

In most cases, a good education is the most important foundation to a successful life.  We’re taught this by parents, and economists regularly corroborate it with statistics showing lower unemployment rates and better incomes for people with greater education. But of course we are regularly reminded of dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but [...]

Living a number of feet off the ground I have a few of traffic flows around a few blocks in my area.  A large number of commuters drive by so I get to see traffic flows like a bird might from above.  Of course we all have the benefit of sitting in traffic.  But for [...]

I’ve awaited Tim Allen’s return to TV for a long time.  Home Improvement was a fantastic show.  His new show is called Last Man Standing.  Since I first saw a commercial on TV for the show, I knew it would be a flop. It will very likely be a flop, but that’s okay.  It’s just [...]

Boing Boing ran a story the other day talking about a paper that tests the IKEA effect.  It’s a simple test designed to show that we place more value on objects we assemble compared to objects someone else put together.  The details of the study are in Boing Boing’s post, but the spoiler alert is [...]